This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी" (Tukaram: For a bedbug a bed is like a castle. so much climbing up and down!)... George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

Shel Silverstein : “Talked my head off Worked my tail off Cried my eyes out Walked my feet off Sang my heart out So you see, There’s really not much left of me.” ~

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

John Gray: "Unlike Schopenhauer, who lamented the human lot, Leopardi believed that the best response to life is laughter. What fascinated Schopenhauer, along with many later writers, was Leopardi’s insistence that illusion is necessary to human happiness."

Justin E.H. Smith: “One should of course take seriously serious efforts to improve society. But when these efforts fail, in whole or in part, it is only humor that offers redemption. So far, human expectations have always been strained, and have always come, give or take a bit, to nothing. In this respect reality itself has the form of a joke, and humor the force of truth.”

Thursday, October 17, 2013

I Will Try to Remember Interesting GPD...गो. पु. देशपांडे

One day a few years ago, I went up to him at Pune airport and introduced myself as my father's son. He warmed up immediately. Then we traveled together on adjacent aisle seats to Delhi.

Earlier my attempt to meet him at Kolkata had failed because I didn't show up at the theatre, after fixing the appointment, where his new play - 'Chanakya Vishnugupt' (चाणक्य विष्णुगुप्त)- was being performed. I had seen the earlier show of the play and found it verbose and boring. I had wanted to leave it halfway!

We kept chatting on all kinds of subjects en route to Delhi via Mumbai and kept quiet only to eat the lunch.

I praised R B Patankar's (रा भा पाटणकर) "Apoorna Kranti' (अपूर्ण क्रांती). He had not liked the book. He had debated it with the author himself. He was surprised to learn from me Keshav Meshram's (केशव मेश्राम) praise for Shripad Krushna Kolhatkar (श्रीपाद कृष्ण कोल्हटकर). (He had no view on Kolhatkar.) He requested me to send him a copy of the article.

However, he and I agreed on how great T S Shejwalkar (त्र्यं शं शेजवलकर) was and how neglected he remained in Maharashtra/ India. He once wanted to translate Shejwalkar into English but the project (for Sahitya Akademi?) did not come through.

He spoke about his own family- he was going to his daughter's place in Delhi- and asked me about mine. At Delhi, once we gathered our baggage, I touched his feet and asked him if I could drop him at some place on my way to Noida. He hesitated but declined the offer in the end.

(I cannot share here all that- on Marathi speaking national leaders, main-stream Marathi newspapers etc- he said to respect his privacy even after his death.)

I kept reading his columns in Economic & Political Weekly (EPW) but found them boring most of the times.

I have his 'Udhwastha Dharmashala' (उध्वस्त धर्मशाळा). I find it verbose and boring. I have still not finished it.

He was a 'committed' writer like most of the 'reformist' (सुधारणावादी) and 'realistic' (वास्तववादी) writers in Maharashtra today are. For me, they all are boring. I can't assess them as writers because I can't finish reading their books or blog pages or newspaper articles or stand (sit?) their TV debates!

But occasionally GPD became interesting such as in the article from EPW I quote below (note- NRM means Non Resident Maharashtrians):

“…The NRMs have decided to celebrate the language that they rarely if
at all speak. But they cannot be blamed. Their relatives and friends do
not speak it either…

… A number of them went to modest schools in Pune, Nagpur or Mumbai.
They perhaps read some books then. Most of them must have read the
grand icon of the middle classes, P L Deshpande. They would remember a
few of his jokes and witticisms. They would have seen some DVDs of his
one-man performances. Whatever little Marathi they might speak there
would be for telling each other PL’s “jokes”. Not for any reason is he
called “Maharashtrache Ladke Vyaktimatva” (Maharashtra’s icon). Of
course there is no reason why they cannot or should not celebrate their
icons. And, after all, “PL” was no ordinary writer.

But
then the point is that it amounts to nostalgia for those years of lower
middle class living. The NRMs do not give the benefits of being cyber
slaves. An occasional return to culture and tradition leaves them in
peace with themselves and with their past…

… Most of the NRMs are cyber slaves in the Silicon Valley. They have no clue as to what is happening in the world of Marathi letters…”

(EPW Issue : VOL 43 No. 28 July 12 - July 18, 2008)

The other interesting thing, for me, he did was scripting 'Mahatma Phule' episode- number 45- of Shyam Benegal's TVserial 'Bharat Ek Khoj' , 1988. It was warm and brilliant.

Pages

Henry Miller: "A picture… is a thousand different things to a thousand different people. Like a book, a piece of sculpture, or a poem. One picture speaks to you, another doesn’t… Some pictures invite you to enter, then make you a prisoner. Some pictures you race through, as if on roller skates. Some lead you out by the back door. Some weigh you down, oppress you for days and weeks on end. Others lift you up to the skies, make you weep with joy or gnash your teeth in despair."...Will Self: “To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. It is this failure – a ceaseless threnody keening through the writing mind – that dominates my working life, just as an overweening sense of not having loved with enough depth or recklessness or tenderness dominates my personal one.” John Berger: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” Ezra Pound: "Make it new"...Mark Twain: "Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance except plagiarism!... For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”… John Crowley: "Meanwhile the real world then, no matter what, will be as racked with pain and insufficiency as any human world at any time. It just won’t be racked by the same old pains and insufficiencies; it will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature."...Alexander Waugh: "Beware of seriousness: it is a form of stupidity"...Charles Simic: "There is a wonderful moment when we realize that the picture we’ve been looking at for a long time has become a part of us as much as some childhood memory or some dream we once had. The attentive eye makes the world interesting. A good photograph, like a good poem, is a self-contained little universe inexhaustible to scrutiny." ... Hilary Mantel: “It’s for Shakespeare to penetrate the heart of a prince, and for me to study his cuff buttons.”… Ingmar Bergman: "It is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life"... Graham Greene: "Kim Philby betrayed his country-yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?"... Friedrich Schlegel: "Hercules…labored too…But the goal of his career was really always a sublime leisure, and for that reason he became one of the Olympians. Not so this Prometheus, the inventor of education and enlightenment…Because he seduced mankind into working, [he] now has to work himself, whether he wants to or not"... Walt Whitman: “Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.”...W H Auden: "…though one cannot always/ Remember exactly why one has been happy,/ There is no forgetting that one was"...Walter de la Mare: "No, No, Why further should we roam / Since every road man Journeys by, / Ends on a hillside far from Home / Under an alien sky"...Franz Kafka: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”..."Over these unremembered marble columns, / birds glide their old remembered way. / Dive in red gold setting tide and write dark alphabets on evening sky /whether an epitaph, chorus or strange augury / little man you only hope to know!"